Garfield has developed in many years of writing dozens of children’s books and historical novels. The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream best reveal the virtuosity Mr. 'Leon Garfield’s performance in Shakespeare Stories is masterly. 'In these lively and evocative pages a child will hear Shakespeare’s poetry set in prose that will lay the groundwork for many a future enchanted evening at the theater.” –Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal His most recent work includes The Seeds of Friendship, which he wrote and illustrated, and the illustrations for Michael Morpurgo’s retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf. Barrie, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Michael Foreman has illustrated more than one hundred books, including those for stories by J.M. Among his best-known books are Devil-in-the-Fog (1966, winner of The Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize), Smith (1967, published in The New York Review Children’s Collection), The God Beneath the Sea (1970, winner of the Carnegie Medal), and John Diamond (1980, winner of the Whitbread Award). In all, Garfield would write some fifty books, including a continuation of Charles Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood and retellings of biblical and Shakespearian stories.

In 1948 he married Vivian Alcock, an artist who would later become a successful writer of children’s books, and it was she who encouraged him to write his first novel, Jack Holborn, which was published in 1964. After the war, he returned to London and worked as a biochemical technician. Garfield enrolled in art school, left to work in an office, and in 1940 was drafted into the army, serving in the medical corps. His father owned a series of businesses, and the family’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Leon Garfield (1921–1996) was born and raised in the seaside town of Brighton, England.

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